What is the impact of integration on productivity? What are the main channels? Is there anything specific about productivity effects in regional agreements? This paper tries to answer these questions by looking at the experience of Brazil and Mexico. We estimate firm-level productivity and test...

This paper estimates the elasticity of substitution of U.S. imports using detailed trade data over the 1990-2003 period. The authors use a two-stage least squares framework in order to identify the elasticity parameter of interest. The authors use the elasticity estimates to assess the extent to...

Tourism is an important source of foreign exchange and employment across developing economies. A scant literature has explored the relationship between tourism and the advent of the internet. This paper contributes to the tourism-trade literature and studies the empirical relationship between...

We study whether international trade fosters democracy. The likely endogeneity between democracy and trade is addressed via the gravity model of trade, allowing us to obtain a measure of natural openness. This serves as our instrumental variable for actual trade openness à la Frankel and Romer...